TotalRecall is an interdisciplinary project where art and philosophy together investigate a topic that stems from an everyday experience of being virtually surrounded by images and texts.

These images and texts are often in a digital form, which has some consequences for the project, but it is not the digital-technological character in itself that is in the forefront.
Instead, it is an experience of images and texts in a new kind of time and space which can most easily be described by means of new media: mobile phones employed to take and distribute photos and videoclips but also textmessages (and tweets); the internet with emphasis on social media (Facebook), blogs and YouTube etc.

The exhibition will focus on landscape painting (landscape in the wider sense) and is emerging through discussions between the participants.

* Total Recall is an action thriller about reality and memory, inspired by the short story "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" by Philip K. Dick. Welcome to Rekall, the company that can turn your dreams into real memories.

Utställare/Exhibitors

What does seeing mean? What is a picture?
Raphael Egli paints pictures from seeing. He goes out and looks at a landscape, at the surface of a lake, at forests, hills and mountains, at buildings and groups of buildings, at the sky and clouds. He paints what he sees in small format and on-site – a picture of the moment, a cursory rendition of landscape, its individual traits typified. But he devotes himself with great intensity to the value of the colours in order to capture a singular mood, a particular lighting. The fleeting light that lies on the landscape and enhances its reaches and depths acquires enduring solidity in Egli’s pigments.Read more

I see painting as a language through which I can get a lot of experience both in and out. Trips, landscapes and landscape memories are sort of my major impulse, but most of the time, back in the studio it seems they are not important at all. While working, they turn quickly in an “antirealist”, an experimental and abstract direction, way of thinking and way of painting. Everything seems to be created without a preconceived notion of a given place, and the outcome should not be an illustration of imaginary or real places (which indeed it sometimes is). I tend to produce paintings and collages with contradictory readings of visual information and strive to create a sense of ambiguity to prevent a certainty of meaning. I always look for different patterns of working, and am constantly trying out new mixes and ways of combining things. Maybe it’s all about looking for new ways of navigation, about extending the sensory experience, to handle ambiguities, simultaneous understandings, orientation and disorientation. Maybe this process could be described as a research game about the uncertainty in our perception and experience of the world. It is interesting to see how painters, musicians, writers use and explore many of the same devices for plotting and executing their work, making crucial decisions about what to include and what to leave out, in order to get us from here to there, without excess baggage or a confusing surplus of information.Read more

“Insofar as we live in a culture whose technological advances abet the production and dissemination of such images at a hitherto unimagined level, it is necessary to focus on how they work and what they do, rather than move past them too quickly to the ideas they represent or the reality they purport to depict” (Martin Jay).

A part of our new predicament, or what may perhaps be called a condition, seems to find expression in a new alloy of emotions and technology. There is an increasing feeling of being constantly submerged in never ending receptions and relays of images and text messages. There is also and at the same time a feeling of extreme rapidity in these processes, which border on re-presentation being simultaneous with the event (digital transmission of live-broadcast). New technology, it seems, alters our traditional conceptions of two central notions, namely our conception of the event and its reproduction. This process is in part well documented in media- and technology studies, urban anthropology and sociology etc. But the philosophical consequences of this condition has proved difficult to fathom not only because of its happening here and now, or the rapidity whereby new technology is introduced.Read more